This disclosure relates to improving the effectiveness of online web advertising.
Advertisers frequently include hyperlinks in their advertisements to pages in their respective web sites. These pages are called “landing pages.” A landing page can be designed to request that a browsing user do something, and this request is called the “call to action.” If an advertisement is for merchandise, the call to action might request that the browsing user buy the merchandise from an online store. The call to action may not always be successful.
One measure of success for online advertising is “conversion,” which is measured by determining whether a browsing user reaches a “conversion page,” which can be an ordinary web pages designated by the advertiser for tracking purposes. A conversion page for an online store advertising a hat for sale might be a page for a virtual shopping cart with the hat in the shopping cart. Alternatively, the conversion page can be an order confirmation page that reflects that the hat was actually purchased. If the advertisement had been placed to generate sales leads, the conversion page might be the web page shown after a browsing user submits contact information. If the advertisement had been placed to encourage people to download a movie trailer, the conversion page might be chosen to be the movie trailer download page. Several conversion pages can correspond to a landing page, if the advertiser believes that several possible outcomes correspond to success. A web site for a movie may have several pages providing movie trailers in different resolutions. More generally, several landing pages and conversion pages can correspond to each other.
The advertiser wants browsing users to reach the landing page from the advertisement, then reach the conversion page from the landing page. The percentage of browsing users who, having reached the landing page, then go on to reach the conversion page is called the “conversion rate.”
The design of the landing page influences the conversion rate. Low conversion rates can result from poorly designed landing pages and landing pages that do not conform to the subjective expectations of browsing users who selected the corresponding advertisements.
An advertiser can design an experiment to determine empirically which of several landing page designs has the best conversion rate. An advertiser may design two different landing pages, conventionally called landing page A and landing page B. For example, the advertiser may want to compare an original landing page with a landing page with a different headline or a landing page with a different image. The advertiser may then conduct an experiment by running the same advertisement for both landing pages, so that some randomly selected group of visitors who select the advertisement see landing page A and others see landing page B. The advertiser then compares the conversion rates of the two landing pages to determine which is more effective. This technique of comparing whole web pages can be called an A/B comparison, an A/B test, or an A/B experiment. Performing an A/B test can require some statistical expertise on the part of the advertiser.